With the in-depth development of the third generation mobile communication (3G, 3rd-generation) technologies, more and more services are provided based on a 3G network. In order to provide different network bearers for different services to utilize network resources more effectively, the conventional 3GPP proposed the policy and charging control (PCC, Policy and Charging Control) control architecture. The PCC control architecture can support dynamic control of bearer network resources according to different users and services, and the PCC control architecture theoretically meets the current increasing requirement for QoS control.
In the conventional PCC control architecture, after receiving a request sent by a user for using a service, a policy and charging enforcement function (PCEF, Policy and Charging Enforcement Function) identifies the service and prepares to request resources from a policy and charging rules function (PCRF, Policy and Charging Rules Function), and triggers a QoS control request from the PCEF to the PCRF. The PCRF searches an internal QoS policy library for a corresponding policy entity according to received information such as service information and user information, and after finding the corresponding policy entity, delivers a QoS policy action to the PCEF. Based on the QoS policy delivered by the PCRF, the PCEF requests resource reservation and granting from an online charging system (OCS, Online Charging System). In the process of requesting resource reservation and granting, a QoS value is sent to the OCS and used as a corresponding charging policy factor for judgment. The OCS makes judgment according to the information of the request and the actual account information of the user, and returns, to the PCEF, a result indicating whether the request succeeds. An actual granting action is performed to the service based on the request result returned by the OCS. If the request succeeds, the QoS is controlled and the user is allowed to use the corresponding service. Otherwise, the user is not allowed to use the corresponding service.
Through research, the inventor finds that in the conventional QoS policy control, because the PCRF only learns about the subscription information of the user and does not learn about whether the user has the ability to enjoy the corresponding QoS currently, the PCRF can only mechanically deliver control parameters to the PCEF according to a predefined policy. After that, only when the PCEF requests resources from the OCS, can the OCS return information about whether there are corresponding resources for enjoying the service. Consequently, a large number of signaling interactions are added inadvertently, and the PCEF also has several invalid control actions and state transitions, which greatly wastes the time for determining the QoS policy and wastes the system resources.